“One thing I learned a long time ago,” chef Joseph “JJ” Reinhart said Tuesday morning: “Thanksgiving – you cannot run out of turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, cranberry or pumpkin pie.”
With a team behind him, the executive sous chef at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikīkī is preparing 450 individual Thanksgiving meals for homeless people, a tradition that today reaches its 30th anniversary. The plan is to deliver the food to the Institute of Human Services late Thursday morning, which will then distribute the meals among its dozen or so shelters in time for dinner.
“The stuffing is going to be made fresh that morning,” Reinhart said. “The green bean casseroles are going to be made fresh that morning. The turkey will already be prepared, we’re going to just gently reheat that so it doesn’t get dry.”
Reinhart gravitated toward kitchens early in life. There wasn’t much else to do growing up in Fostoria, a small town in a largely rural and industrial area of northwestern Ohio. He called it farm country, adding, “I didn’t have neighborhood kids to play with. So I had to figure out things to entertain myself at home.”
Food was a natural interest. It remained so even during Reinhart’s brief career as a touring trumpet player, which netted him Tony and Emmy awards for performing in the show “Blast.” Once that musical closed, he said, he realized he was tired of being on the road. He switched careers and went to culinary school, landing an internship that turned into a full-time private chef job at the Playboy Mansion.
Something else he learned a long time ago: Being a chef requires knowing when to stick to the script and when to adapt or add variety.
Playboy Magazine founder Hugh Hefner had a 26-item menu, Reinhart said, and “he did not deviate from that menu.”
Meanwhile, the women who came in and out for photo shoots could order anything they wanted, he said, as long as the kitchen had the ingredients in stock. If they didn’t know what they wanted, Reinhart would offer them grilled cheese and tomato soup.
“That was the Playmate special,” he said.
There’s also some room for variety, it turns out, when it comes to a traditional Thanksgiving meal. Reinhart said he adds bay leaf to his cranberry sauce to make it a little savory, and under his leadership the mixed vegetables that used to be included in the donated meals were replaced with a more traditional green bean casserole.
“I can put little touches on things,” he said. “But Thanksgiving is so much about tradition. So we don’t want to mess with tradition too much.”
Civil Beat’s reporting on economic inequality is supported by the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation as part of its work to build equity for all through the CHANGE Framework; and by the Cooke Foundation and our community health coverage is supported in part by the Atherton Family Foundation.
